64/100
Spent a lot of May feeling as if there were just too damn much going on with May. You've got the lazy eye that makes her a social outcast (swiftly corrected); you've got the creepy-ass doll whose voice seems to inter...
2025-12-08 01:27:31 +0000 UTC View Post
60/100
Irresistible for about 40 minutes, thanks to the human Borrowers’ treasure trove of self-shot video—this project was surprisingly well-documented for the pre-smartphone era, and often shot from a variety of well-chosen an...
2025-12-05 22:18:36 +0000 UTC View Post
64/100
Improvisation rarely appeals to me, instrumental noodling still less, so I’ve never listened to Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. Nor has Köln 75 exactly jump-started my interest—hardly surprising, s...
2025-12-05 03:58:04 +0000 UTC View Post
57/100
Dirty pool to have my standard walk-out point (at ⅓ of total runtime) fall just as the choirgirls’ game of Truth or Dare is heating up. (Dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the convent—that’s where they’re rehearsin...
2025-12-04 23:05:29 +0000 UTC View Post
33/100
Second viewing, last seen during its 1992 U.S. theatrical release. Having loved Leconte’s previous film, Monsieur Hire,...
2025-12-04 03:59:54 +0000 UTC View Post
62/100
Was After Hours mentioned in the press kit or something? I see virtually no resemblance outside of both being set in lower Manhattan (it’s not even the same neighborhood, East Village rather than SoHo; I lived on 1...
2025-12-03 14:49:30 +0000 UTC View PostAs a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I'm revisiting mostly just because it's been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly s...
2025-12-01 21:09:52 +0000 UTC View Post
40/100
From apathy to enmity: a journey. Spent the movie’s first hour or so faintly bored, which seems almost inevitable—it’s essentially a biopic focused on the celebrated person’s wife and small children, about whom virtua...
2025-12-01 01:43:57 +0000 UTC View Post
49/100
Crippled by rampant phoniness, plus some surprising ineptitude. I don’t blame Billy Crudup, who salvages that scene as best he can from beneath a singularly unflattering haircut, but the whole “Now I’ll drop the mask an...
2025-11-30 02:16:05 +0000 UTC View Post
50/100
One of the long-forgotten indie films I “reviewed” (in 100-word capsules) for Entertainment Weekly back in the late ’90s bore the cringeworthy title I Love You, Don’t Touch Me! And that’s more or l...
2025-11-29 20:55:48 +0000 UTC View Post
73/100
That '86 Soderbergh notebook entry became sex, lies and videotape...and also serves as a perfect logline for the remar...
2025-11-27 04:27:30 +0000 UTC View Post
54/100
Avoided this for many years because it looked like non-stop Fallacy of the Profane Granny. Nuns snorting coke and shooting heroin! A convent decorated with Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch pin-ups! There's a tiger roaming arou...
2025-11-26 23:51:27 +0000 UTC View Post
66/100
Let me note first my single favorite thing about this movie: Its original title, Sciuscià, turns out to be not the Italian word for "shoeshine" (as I'd always assumed), but rather a transliteration of how t...
2025-11-25 05:49:57 +0000 UTC View Post
59/100
Raves: not even once.
[I guess there's one minor SPOILER below.]
Harrowing, to be sure, and it's arguably my own fault that the punishment our heroes(?) endure seemed wildly disproportionate. Or ...
2025-11-24 01:23:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Shoeshine got off to a quick lead in last week's request poll but was ultimately overtaken by Landscape Suicide. This week, it handily beat Branagh's Henry V and the new Running Man, pulling in 51% of the vote. ...
2025-11-22 01:37:24 +0000 UTC View Post
53/100
Something I assumed about Oscar: Sylvester Stallone plays a character named Oscar. (Oscar doesn't show up until 40 seconds before The End.)
Something else I assumed about Oscar: Stallone 2025-11-22 00:53:21 +0000 UTC View Post
63/100
Looking up where I could watch Landscape Suicide (Tubi, surprisingly, but see Anal-Retentive Title Corner below), I inadvertently glimpsed the first few lines of a description, which read: "Benning continue...
2025-11-20 05:22:04 +0000 UTC View Post
53/100
Not the warped fairytale I'd assumed (based on every promotional still), for better and worse. Better in that Hadžihalilović's strengths are largely suggestive, intimating another, stranger world at the threshold of our own...
2025-11-18 23:50:27 +0000 UTC View Post
56/100
Second viewing, last seen at Anthology Film Archives' complete Cronenberg retro in 2002...during the course of which I also first watched Rabid and found that to be Shivers' much more accomplished near-ident...
2025-11-18 03:10:54 +0000 UTC View Post
63/100
Can't imagine ever being anything but excited to see Cattet & Forzani ask themselves questions like "How can we create something visually spectacular from four quick shots of a man walking down a hotel corridor, stopping ...
2025-11-17 03:41:53 +0000 UTC View Post
50/100
Title's final word does a lot of load-bearing work here. To be fair, so does Tom Sweet's presence (more than his performance per se; he mostly just looks absolutely perfect, a real casting coup) as the pre-p...
2025-11-15 23:18:28 +0000 UTC View PostHope so, since Landscape Suicide came from behind (or so various comments suggest; I wasn't paying attention myself) to eke out a victory over Shoeshine in this week's request poll, with Splitsville a distant third. Whil...
2025-11-15 02:26:18 +0000 UTC View Post
57/100
Second viewing, last seen 24 June 1995. (My screening log indicates that I rented it from Kim's Video between theatrical viewings that same day of Apollo 13 and Party Girl—the one starring Parker Posey, no...
2025-11-15 02:10:33 +0000 UTC View Post
56/100
Honestly, I didn't even need the high-concept premise. Would happily have watched an entire movie about Seth Rogen as a blowhard finance bro and Aziz Ansari as his put-upon personal assistant. Just watching them riff about an...
2025-11-14 01:44:28 +0000 UTC View Post
62/100
Anyone know Tsui's colored-gel budget for this sucker? Every dollar withheld from F/X work—released the same year that Jurassic Park made it clear that digital was the future, Green Snake features tsunamis...
2025-11-13 08:17:20 +0000 UTC View PostAs I noted in the most recent Quibi post, my October rewatches of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (85/100) and I...
2025-11-11 19:30:21 +0000 UTC View Post
42/100
Dunno if I'd say there are actual spoilers below, but I do give away a pretty funny joke right off the bat.
Like all of my friends who've seen Sentimental Value, I cracked up when Stellan Skar...
2025-11-11 01:52:23 +0000 UTC View Post
59/100
Easily the most remarkable thing about Loktev's epic documentary project (Part II: Exile, due sometime next year, will apparently also run somewhere around five hours) is that she began shooting about four months bef...
2025-11-10 01:42:25 +0000 UTC View Post
76/100
Second viewing, last seen at NYU (seems to have been a class on early sound in Hollywood; I wasn't actually taking it, just sitting in on screenings) in 1995. Were I to draft a list of the most purely likeable characters in c...
2025-11-08 19:42:13 +0000 UTC View Post
55/100
Best of the three films, though that's not saying 2025-11-08 02:07:34 +0000 UTC View Post